


red and unafraid of living

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Angst, Fairy Tale Retellings, Hiatus, Identity Issues, M/M, Post-Break Up, velveteen rabbit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 08:01:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18656293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Pete was Real when Patrick loved him. Before Patrick, he was just a toy. Patrick made his skin feel, his heart beat, his blood flow. Now he’s lost his band, Patrick’s love, and maybe his mind too. Now he’s turning back to empty pill-bottle plastic.A hiatus-era Velveteen Rabbit AU.





	red and unafraid of living

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to the very first fic I'm posting in 2019! I haven't forgotten about you guys, I swear. I've been busy attending to my own life (overbooked at work, relationship conflict, falling in love, being _happy_ ) and had less energy than ever to direct towards fic. I have lots of things in progress and no particular direction--so I'm so grateful to the [Once Upon A Peterick challenge](https://peterickcreationschallenge.tumblr.com/) for giving me some gusto to put together this heartbreaker for you.
> 
> I love you guys and look forward to hearing what you think of this one. Don't forget [ the sad jams!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2bdNZnkWqo9B1bPkDfSDiw)

 

__

 

 

* * *

 

_‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.’_

_‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit._

_‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’_

_‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’_

_‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’_

* * *

 

 

“You’re not a person, you’re a punishment.”

He keeps playing the words over and over, a river stone he turns in his mind as if it could one day be smooth. It’s not the words themselves, nor the pain of them—both things he earned, deserves, is used to. It’s the way he _flickered_ , or thinks he did. The way he went immaterial for the length of one heart’s beat, for the length of one heart’s doubt.

_You’re not a person._

_Not a person._

_Not a person._

_You’re not real_.

All Pete has ever wanted is to be real.

*

_When you’re real, you don’t mind being hurt._

That’s what the other toys used to say, when Pete was still plastic. When his chest was hollow and he had no nerves, when the only sensations he could truly feel were pressure and warmth. The first time Patrick kissed him, his heart didn’t race, for he had none; his blood didn’t thunder, for his veins rattled empty; and his skin didn’t tingle or thrill, for he was made of silicone.

Well, Pete’s real now. Pete hurts all the time now. Pete fucking minds it.

*

He dials Patrick’s number thirteen times a night, never presses call. He writes letters and tears them into long skinny strips. He composes song verses in text messages, deletes them keystroke by keystroke til the white box blinks blank. He doesn’t know who he’s talking to anymore. He doesn’t know who’s talking.

Patrick said to him _you’re not a person, you’re a punishment_ , and the part that’s fucking him up is, his hands _flickered_. Skin to plastic and back again, just for a second. He thinks. He thinks. Did he feel hot, muffled, leaden? Did he feel at all?

*

Pete remembers the moment he first became. It wasn’t when Patrick first kissed him, wasn’t the first time Patrick held Pete against his chest and looked at him with an intensity of longing that bordered on fear. It would have been romantic, if it had been a first time—if Patrick’s searing touch jolted him into Being all-at-once, a spark where once had been only void—but the truth is almost never romantic.

How it happens is, they’ve been full-body fucking for months before Pete turns real. It’s during an argument, two shitty kids screaming at each other in the rain—the worst fight they’ve had yet, worse even than that time Patrick grabbed him by the throat while they were writing a song that didn’t even end up on the record. It’s a fight about a girl, one of the ones Pete allowed to touch him. It doesn’t bother him, the touching. Sure, he thinks of himself as Patrick’s, not so much as in _belonging to_ , but as in _a belonging_ —but Pete is used to being used. It’s what he was made for. Besides, he likes the attention.

“I don’t get you! I don’t even understand why this is a problem!” Pete is yelling, his fists blistering at his sides, rain running thick from his overgrown hair into his eyes. He is drenched to the skin, to the bone, to the wire frame. They’ve been out here a while, long enough that Patrick’s voice is going hoarse. Long enough that Pete, who barely feels anything, is going sluggish with cold.

Because he isn’t Real, what Pete knows about people is this: you can love them wholly and desperately with your whole self, and it won’t be enough. They’ll think you’re fun right up until the day they outgrow and discard you. They will love you til they don’t. Only the very luckiest are ever kept. Only the very luckiest are ever _really_ loved.

What Pete knows is, it doesn’t matter what happens to you before you are Real. Girls, boys, rock bands, record deals. Anything could happen to him, anyone. He doesn’t mind it.

Evidently, what Patrick knows about people is something different. He’s pink-faced furious, howling back at Pete. “You sleep with someone new in every city and don’t get why that might be a problem for me? You have this string of girlfriends and exes, and you’re all over me on stage, and sometimes you’re all over me off stage, and sometimes you just fall in the lap of whoever’s closest—”

“You don’t complain when it’s your lap,” Pete points out.

Patrick’s mouth opens and then closes again. His eyes burn hard and bright, hot copper fury shining the contrast in the blood-and-cream of his coloring.  Pete’s made an art form of pissing Patrick off, but even he’s never seen this face before. Pete _feels_ it, a tight slither in his belly—

“And it’s no different to you, right? That’s what you’re saying?”

Patrick is bellowing to break crystal, but it’s hard to focus on what he’s saying when Pete’s body is feeling so strange. His guts feel _wet_ —feel like _guts_ , when really he knows that beneath his carapace, it’s just clockwork and wind-up parts, clean and dry. Imagine how upsetting it is to feel _that_ gurgle!

“My body is the same as any other to you, is that right?”

Something is happening in Pete’s chest. Heat, pressure—hammering? He can feel something moving around in there, like a spring is loose, like he needs repairing. There’s a—a _swoopy_ feeling. His palms—yes—they are producing moisture. This isn’t a feature Pete knew he had.

“Something is happening to me that’s never happened before,” Pete blurts out, panicking, stopping Patrick’s rant in its tracks. On Patrick’s face, he sees the anger transform into something softer—into relief, maybe. Into the feeling of being understood.

“Yeah, exactly,” he says. “Me too.”

Pete feels like he might puke, or at least he assumes this is what it feels like when you’re about to puke. His mouth fills up with more saliva than he needs for basic lubrication and manual speech functions. His eyes prickle like there’s sand in them, tearing up. His hands open and close of their own volition. Whatever that thing is in his chest, it’s banging against his sternum, trying to bust out.

“This is the first time I’ve ever felt like this,” Pete says. He’s trying to explain something he doesn’t have words for. He’s trying to explain the type of sensory phenomena language was invented to express, the type of emotional experience language almost immediately defaulted on its ability to capture. Pete feels suddenly very human.

“Seeing you with other people—it makes me realize, um, how much I don’t want you to be with other people. How much I want you to be—mine.”

Pete can hear the ocean, feel its tides lapping and throbbing all through his body. His fingernails bite into his palms, and this _stings_ as it never has before, burns like salt. There’s a give to his flesh, like rotten fruit. Like there’s something soft inside. Like it really _is_ flesh, and not a toymaker’s imitation.

“I’ve always been yours,” Pete says. There’s no point guarding his tongue, not now, not when Patrick is screaming and his body is melting and the heavens themselves are weeping. “I think I was made for you.”

Patrick sounds wretched and scared when he says, “I _love_ you, Pete.”

Pete looks down at his hands. Thin red fluid is leaking up around his fingernails where they bite into his palms. Diluted by rainwater, he thinks it’s blood. But he couldn’t bleed, not unless he was—

“Real,” Pete whispers, struck with shock and wonder.

“Yeah. It’s real,” says Patrick, misunderstanding. “I think I was made to love you, too.”

Pete doesn’t know how to explain to Patrick that he’s a human, born, not _made_ for anything—that for Pete it’s not just a figure of speech. Pete barely knows how to stand on his own legs and not panic, now that they’re squishy, meat-filled, living _flesh_. He feels a little faint at the notion that at this very moment, _blood_ is apparently circulating inside him.

Pete doesn’t know what to do, but Patrick does. Patrick walks through the pothole puddles between them, closes the gap. Rainwater quivers at the ends of his eyelashes. Up close, his face pale and chilled, his lips ruby red, Patrick says, “This is the part where you say you love me too.”

Pete is Real because Patrick loves him. Of course Pete loves Patrick too. He closes his eyes, breath rasping unsteady within him for the first time. He swallows hard, whispers: “I love you too.”

Then Patrick’s hand is on his jaw, Patrick’s cold lips are pressing his. For the first time ever, Pete feels a heartbeat from the inside. His new heart speeds its answer to Patrick’s body, his mouth knowing the shape of kissing back even while his brain stalls out, his dick stirring to innervated life with full feeling. Everything is new. Everything is the same, but with the plastic ripped open, the layers torn back, the raw nerves of it _exposed_. Pete’s whole body is puffy new skin with the bandaid peeled back, feeling air and pressure, sensation and _touch_ , out from under the long-term muffle of his manufacture.

For so long, being real is all he’s wanted. Kissing Patrick in the rain, all he wants now is to cry.

He’s never done that before either.

*

So right from the start, he didn’t love Patrick the right way. He was all mixed up inside about it. The way Patrick realized he loved Pete enough to keep, the way Pete finally and impossibly became real, even, was not the way it goes in stories. It wasn’t swans and long-stemmed roses, shooting stars and declarations. It was Pete fucking someone else, fucking up.

He does love Patrick, is the thing. Tremendously, awfully, terrifyingly. He’s been in love since the moment he laid eyes on this kid, practically. He’s just never been able to express it in the right way. To get the right words out at the right time, in the right order. To feel the expected thing at the appropriate time. Even since he’s been real, he’s so obviously just a knock-off human. So clearly just a fake.

It’s no surprise, really, that things end up how they do.

The last time he sees Patrick, they play a few songs and answer a few questions for a radio station they’d agreed to do forever ago, before anyone had started saying words like _hiatus_ and meaning _never again_. Just because your world is ending doesn’t mean you get to stop promoting your final album. Patrick still loved him, Pete thinks, when they accepted this gig. Patrick doesn’t love him now. It is so fucking obvious that Patrick doesn’t love him now.

The torture of small talk with someone you used to love, that’s the theme of being together in a radio station after Patrick ended their relationship and Pete ended their band. Not that Pete ever stopped loving Patrick. Just—he never learned how to do it right. And then Patrick stopped waiting.

The last time Pete sees Patrick, Patrick says, “Fuck, this is harder than I thought. I don’t think I can be around you anymore.”

“We’re almost done for the day,” Pete says, keeping shoulders bowed and head slumped low, trying to be small and mild. Trying to make this less painful for Patrick, who has decided Pete’s too much to be around, too much to love. Like he wasn’t enough his whole life, til he became real, and ever since then he’s just been too much.

“No, I mean… I don’t think I can be around you _at all_.”

“But—you’re my best friend,” Pete says, a little blankly. This should be obvious. “I love you. There’s no me without you in my life.”

“That’s the kind of shit I’m talking about,” Patrick says. “I don’t think you’ve ever loved anyone. I don’t think you can.”

“Tell me how, then,” Pete says. It isn’t the first time he’s asked. “Show me. I can do what you like. I can—”

“You can go through the motions like you always do,” Patrick interrupted. “No, Pete. No more. God—you make me feel so disgusting. Like just one more of a thousand people who used you as a thing. I used to think they were sick, you know? The people who took advantage of you. Whoever, whatever caught you in the smoky part of a club. I’d think, how could you do that _to_ someone and not _with_ them, how could you be intimate with someone who’s not really showing up? But it’s not just willing bodies in clubs, is it. It’s fans, managers, photographers, TV stations, the entire fucking internet. You’re a black hole where consent should be. And—I don’t know, Pete. I wonder if it’s _you_.”

“Me?”

“If you’re just—hollow. If the reason you’re not showing up is because—there’s nothing really there.”

It’s like having Pete’s worst fear about himself come true in a fucking radio studio. The host keeps walking past, stealing glances. A distant part of Pete is sure this will show up on the internet later—more rumors about his bad behavior, the corrosive effect of Pete Wentz on any given relationship. Pete knows he should be focusing on what Patrick was saying, knows the pain of this should be showing on his face—knows that this is what Patrick wants to see. That he can be human. That he can react in a way that makes sense. That he can show up.

Pete knows that Patrick is saying these things to Pete only because some part of him still hopes to be proved wrong.

“So people have no choice but to use me,” Pete says, like he’s reciting someone else’s breakup lines. He feels like he’s plastic again, though by now he’s been flesh and blood for years. He feels—nothing.  “Because I’m not a subject. Just an object to be used?”

On Patrick’s face, for one moment—hesitation. Bright pain. Some last part him that does not want to make Pete hurt.

But the rest of him does.

“Sometimes I think you’re not a person, you’re a punishment. And that’s why I can’t have you in my life. Because I don’t want to think about someone I love that way. You make me someone I don’t like being, and—that’s not what love should do.”

“Love?” echoed Pete.

Patrick’s face flickers darkly. “Love,” he says firmly. “I’m always going to fucking love you, Pete. Give me that much credit. I just don’t think I can like you anymore.”

Three months later, and they haven’t talked since. Each day that goes by with no contact between them, the more sure Pete becomes that Patrick is right. He is just a thing. To prove it, he’s turning back to plastic and hollow. He’s turning into what he’s always been:

Nothing.

*

There are pills that help him get there. To the numbed-out heavy plastic feeling. He doubles up on his anxiety meds, the ones that vacuum-seal his panic attacks like leftover casserole and shove them to the back of the fridge, where hopefully he’ll forget them instead of finishing them later. They work pretty well for heartbreak too. They rise like floodwater in his veins, leaching the color out of his self-hatred. Pharmaceuticals feel the same as plastic, at a certain dose. Pete finds the smother familiar. The claustrophobia is comfortable.

Pill by pill, he buries himself.

Today, he takes his son and his benzos to the L.A. Arboretum. Every time he starts to worry about what will happen to Bronx when he turns back to plastic, a Father Figurine, he lays another flake of Xanax on his tongue. Eventually, he isn’t anxious about anything at all.

Bronx toddles ahead of him on the serpentine trail through the Plants of Australia biome, chasing lizards in the goal-obsessed but hopelessly ineffective way of a 16-month-old. Pete focuses on the feel of sun on his shoulders and back, the prickle of solar radiation biting at skin. He’s sure there are parts of him that feel waxy and numb, as he loses his realness, as he loses Patrick’s love. He never noticed how clumsy he was, when he’d not yet been real—but he knows now what a rich stream of data and feedback flows through sensation. The impending loss of what made him, briefly, human is absolute fucking agony. He just wants it over with. Going cold inch by inch, a jagged mirror of the way he lost Patrick, is salt upon his body, the wound.

His body the wound. The wound he inflicts on others ( _you’re a punishment, not a person_ ), on himself. Ugh. Pete is exhausted of himself. He runs after Bronx on the twisting path, scoops up his baby, and hugs the laughing, delighted child to his chest. Bronx glows with captured sunlight and Pete holds him like a second heartbeat. He has done this one good thing. He kisses his son’s smiling face, is still real enough to smile back.

This time, when his dose starts to wane like a late-season moon, he lets it. The ache comes back, the uncontrollability of it all, his worry and fear. With Bronx at his side, he minds it less. With Bronx at his side, he takes deep breaths for the joy of having lungs.

It’s real enough.

*

His dogs don’t trust him anymore. Pete assumes it’s his smell. It must be changing.

This morning, in the grey twilight between consciousness and oblivion, he lays in his bed paralyzed. From the knee down, his right leg is stiff silicone. A ball joint like a Barbie doll in hard, flesh-toned plastic. Living flesh connects to imitation. He rakes his fingers over it, feeling the frayed seam where the materials meet. Organic, inorganic. Where the nerves hit plastic and die, there is sickly-sweet, withering pain. Pete imagines he can feel the fibers peel away, like life is a skin to slough off, like he can molt it away. Pete does not know if he is dreaming. He wakes up gasping, his palm seizing around his kneecap.

He digs his fingernails in to check. The half-moon idents stay terribly pale for one beat, two. Then they flush giddy with blood, hot under the surface and eager to bruise. His leg is real again, for now.

*

Those first few months, they are solid gold. Pete fully Realized, a _person_ , and Patrick lapping at his throat, Patrick’s hand fisting his dick, his hand down Patrick’s pants, his ear pressed to the echo chamber of Patrick’s vibrating heart. It’s the first time he’s ever been happy. It’s the first time he’s ever been anything.

A Saturday in April, unseasonably warm. They’re in Pete’s bed in the Roscoe Street apartment, and the quality of light up here is like an enchantment. Outside the sun burns yellow as an egg yolk, but in Pete’s room the windows are thrown open and clear, cool white light falls across the sheets, their bodies, their embrace. They’ve been in bed for hours. Patrick is outlining Pete’s body in bruises, biting at first so slow and gentle Pete can barely stand it, sucking and digging his teeth by agonizing degrees, til Pete squirms and bucks against him, til Pete wraps his fingers in Patrick’s hair and tugs his head away. Patrick’s lips smack off him, leaving a flushed red pre-bruised imprint of his mouth on Pete’s hip (or stomach, or rib, or chest, or thigh—Patrick marks Pete with his mouth all over—), and Patrick grins while Pete gasps, staring at the blood-rubied skin with naked wonder. He’s never had a body that could do this before. He’s always been something you could only break, never bruise.

“Easier to just spell out PATRICK’S, at this point,” Pete huffs, throwing his head back against the pillow because it’s all entirely too much.

“MINE has fewer letters,” Patrick suggests, coming to lay beside Pete. He curls his body close, props himself up on one elbow, traces the contours of Pete’s body with his other hand. He snaps his teeth in Pete’s ear, grinning. “Unless you think you can take all that?”

A sigh like pleading parts Pete’s lips without his permission. The light behind Patrick’s head outlines him, copper and gold. The canines that leave purple-point bruises in Pete’s new flesh are framed by pretty, kiss-swollen lips, and Patrick’s eyes sparkle with uncomplicated joy.

“I can take anything,” Pete says, and his dick twitches against his bitten thigh, on its way back to hard with the thought of what Patrick might give him.

Patrick gleams like a livewire. He darts in to kiss Pete’s mouth open, hard and fast and searching, then pushes himself to his knees. He kisses down Pete’s chest, Pete’s belly, his mouth shaped as a smirk. He waggles his hips side to side like a playful puppy, licks hard into Pete’s hip crease, digs his chin in to sensitive skin. Pete does not try to bite back his moan. He’s glad to feel pleasure so ocean-swell enormous, grateful to be salt-drenched and swept away.

Patrick traces his fingers lightly down Pete’s dick, still sticky and warm from the last time he came, and lifts it to drag the head slowly across his lips. A quick flick of his tongue and Pete’s hips buck without his permission. “Teach me to tease you,” Patrick purrs, face full of mischief. “Tell me what feels good.”

He licks the head of Pete’s dick thoughtfully, making popsicle strokes with his wet pink tongue, making eye contact. He tongues the cleft to make Pete groan, laps the slit to see his hips wriggle, sweeps his tongue around the ridge and sucks the head into his mouth in a way that makes Pete say his name. _FuckPatrickfuckPatrickfuck_ : Pete chants a benediction. Patrick sucks methodically, his obscene red lips swallowing the tip of Pete’s dick, and keeps a fist around Pete’s shaft so Pete’s involuntary thrusts don’t get him anywhere. His eyes sparkle the whole time. It is agony, it’s killing him, and Pete can’t wait to die.

Patrick pulls back, wipes his hand along his chin, smears shine around his lips. He smiles at Pete, the mischief melting til his face is completely soft, and says, “This is the happiest I can ever remember being.”

Before Pete has a chance to respond, Patrick’s mouth resumes its work, eclipsing language entirely. Pete came too recently for his body to orgasm again—the refractory period is a brand new part of this real live human biology—but that doesn’t stop pleasure from flowing through him. His muscles turn liquid under his skin, his heartbeat remakes his whole body in throb. He doesn’t have to lie. He closes his eyes, squeezes the sheets in his fists, and gasps out to the ceiling, “Me too, me too, me too.”

*

He tries to write. He stares at the one line he’s come up with. _It’s the end of pretend_. He doesn’t know how he’ll get a whole song out of that, but nothing else will come.

When he was a toy, writing was like this. Difficult, syrup slow, always somehow— _lacking_. Instead of clear, running water, he sludged through muck. He’d have a song in his head, in his heart, but it was like he’d been built without the mechanism to express it. The harder he tried to be raw, the more obvious it always was that he was muted and numb. Anything that he managed to set down was just a poor translation, hopelessly diluted by clumsiness. Like Pete, really. Just guessing at what it’s like to feel real.

What he’s stuck on, now? It’s how to set words on a page, knowing they’ll lay there lifeless without Patrick’s tongue to animate them.

Pete drops his pen, rests his forehead on the soft spread pages of his notebook. It’s the end of pretend. He waits to turn back into nothing.

*

_it’s like i don’t remember how to write without you_

Pete sends the message before he can come to his senses and stop himself. It prickles up and down his arms, across his shoulders, puckering his skin—the anticipation. Maybe Patrick will say something back. Maybe the fucking Berlin Wall of silence between them can come down. Maybe, even though Patrick left him, even though Pete blew up the band with his bad behavior, even though the love that brought him to life is guttering out and taking Pete with it—maybe they can still send a text across the continent, from time to time. Maybe they can have that.

Minutes turn to hours turn to days. Pete’s tattoos look so different when the skin is plastic. He’s certain, now, that he’s flickering in and out. He starts with his fingernails, testing, digging to feel. How far down does it go? Is there any part left that’s true?

Fingernails are only so long. He tries a knife next. Not anything serious. Really. He’s just—scratching the surface. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t bleed. It’s like the scratch in the finish of anything inorganic. Sure, some of the paint scrapes off. But there are no layers. All the way down, it’s the same empty thing.

Pete doesn’t bleed. Patrick doesn’t write back. Every day, he thinks his heartbeat’s getting fainter.

*

Out of options, out of time.

Pete goes back to the place he was made.

In the shadow of a neighborhood, a place like slipping between sidewalk cracks, there is a boarded-up shop. The windows, dusty, hold nothing. Pete cannot even make out his reflection in the fogged glass.

He goes around back—there’s a trick to unlatching the gate—and knocks on the sun-bleached wood of the back door, once painted cheerful and welcoming and now as faded as Pete feels.

The toymaker is long gone, but they left toys behind. Pete doesn’t have to wait long before someone lets him in.

It’s an old toy, a threadbare stuffed bear with a hard, snubbed-velvet face. It was here before Pete was, will be here long after. It looks Pete over, its face blank and unchanging in the way of toys, but Pete catches a glimmer in its eye. The bear was always wiser, more cautious and worldly, than the toys that passed through. When Pete was still just a toy boy in the window of a workshop, plastic and pliant and intended only for others’ expression of pleasure and pain, this stuffed bear was the one who told him about Becoming—who told him that one day, if he was very good, if he was enough, if someone loved him, he could become real.

Pete’s on his knees without deciding to kneel. His voice scrapes his throat. “You said once I was real, it wouldn’t hurt,” he says. His voice is snotty, ugly with a sob. This fluid-of-face, fluid-in-throat, this living drowning that is a human being—Pete did not prepare for how _wet_ it was going to be, becoming.

“When you are real, everything hurts,” the bear says. “It always hurts.”

Pete feels his face crumple, feels the tears sting as they come. “You said—” His words are getting stuck. His throat is turning false, he knows it. “You made me think it would be easier.”

The rough old bear regards him sadly. Then it does something Pete’s never seen. It fits its paws under its jaw and digs into the seams. For a horrible moment Pete thinks it’s tearing its own head off—but then the fur lifts away and Pete is looking at the face of a toy that looks just like him.

Pete marvels. The ragged fur has been a costume all along. He thinks of the first things he wore, the outfit he was made in, and how he had to learn how to change his clothes to be convincing outside of the workshop, to pass in the real world. The bear isn’t wise, isn’t some ancient expert sage. He’s just Pete, or a version of him. A Pete who’s never even left the workshop at all. Just a sad, hollow poet, dreaming of what he knows nothing about.

“I wonder,” the boy in the bear suit says, “why you’re so sure you’re Real at all?”

This is the very last thing Pete expects anyone to say, let alone someone wearing his face. The one thing he’s been sure of, as his life blows up around him, is that he’s real. Real and not especially good at it. Real and isn’t that the problem of him, that for years he wasn’t enough and finally, finally, achieving personhood made him too much. Real and still fucking disposable. Real and still all wrong for Patrick. Real and still unloved, left, alone.

Pete thrusts out his arm. It’s easier than language. “Look,” he says, and squeezes his own flesh. When he releases, the skin flushes pink with blood. “My body changed. Became more—mine. I can feel things I didn’t used to feel.”

The boy in the bear suit scoffs. His face is nearly as expressive as Pete’s. You can barely tell which one of them is Real. “So that’s all it is? A feeling? My life has been wasting in this shop all these years for some kind of run-of-the-mill _sensation_? Toys feel plenty. Too much, sometimes. You did.”

It’s not just a feeling, though. It’s not just sweating and crying, not just a dick that needs to rest and wounds that bleed and a heart that beats. It’s that Patrick loved him.

“Someone loved me,” he tells the boy in the bear suit. “Til he couldn’t anymore. I was real, and now I’m turning back.”

The boy in the bear suit shakes his head. “You’re wrong. Real love can’t be taken back, even when it’s over. Maybe you were never real. Maybe you just got distracted and forgot you were plastic.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to be loved. That’s impossible.”

The boy in the bear suit shrugs. “Then maybe he didn’t really love you.”

Pete grabs a discarded pair of thick sewing scissors off a dusty shelf. He’s not thinking. His whole body sings like a tuning fork of rage. “He—made—me— _real_ ,” he snarls, and rakes the scissor blade across his forearm, opening up a bright seam of blood. Blood for proof, blood for penance, blood for presence. It’s all blood these days. As the life of him spills over and falls, he thrusts the wound in the boy’s face. “Real loves and real bleeds and real loses _everything_ it has. It isn’t romantic or perfect or even very good, it doesn’t solve a damn thing, and it’s so much harder than you think, hiding behind your mask and telling everyone else how to live life!”

The face of the boy in the bear suit doesn’t change. Was Pete ever so placid, so unmoved? Life is so close to the surface for him now. Suddenly ashamed, he pulls a sleeve down over his bleeding arm, hides it.

“Sounds like you know exactly what you are,” the boy in the bear suit says.

He’s right. Pete leaves the workshop. There’s nothing for him there.

*

Part of what makes a heart real is that it can break.

Pete tries to fit this idea inside himself. He bled, for the boy dressed as a mascot, a zoo animal, something less and more than he was. He bled for the boy with his own face. He let down everyone who loved him. He broke Patrick’s heart, and his own.

And Pete thinks, maybe the realest thing you can do is disappoint someone who loves you. Maybe fucking up all the time is the most human thing he can possibly do.

*

A layover, a missed connection, and the Dallas airport at 7pm on a Sunday: five terminals of Tex Mex, Christian bookstores, and gift shops where everything has a cowboy hat on it. And every single thing is closed.

His band has decided this is Pete’s fault. He knows this because of the glares they keep shooting him, the general airborne animosity, and also the way Patrick growled at him, “This is your fault.”

The four of them are riding the Skylink train around and around the airport like the protagonists of a zombie apocalypse, foraging for supplies. They left their crew behind at the gate, where they’re probably drawing straws to see who gets eaten first.

Everyone is overtired and crabby from traveling already, but sometime around the fifth abandoned McDonald’s kiosk, group cohesion really starts to break down. They haven’t eaten anything but airline pretzels and fractions of gross Andy protein bars in eight hours.

“Literally _everything_ is closed, though?” Andy asks a not-super-friendly airport security guard in the third deserted terminal.

“It’s the Lord’s day,” the security guard says. His tone is so dry, his voice so drawly, that it is impossible to tell whether he is joking.

“Is there a terminal where, like, atheists can go eat?” Andy asks.

The security guard just stares forbiddingly. The group of them, tattooed and wild-haired and wearing girls’ clothes, are so obviously heathens that Andy does not ask follow-up questions. They back away slowly, get back on the terminal train.

“I can’t believe we missed our fight because of your commitment to fashion,” Joe grumbles as they re-board the circular train to nowhere, taking up the cause of the everything-is-Pete’s-fault movement. Even Andy cuts a look in his direction, stomach growling so loudly Pete can hear it.

What Joe’s intimating is this: Pete’s 3 belts and multitudinous bracelets set off the security scanner, got him pulled out of line for a private patdown and questioning by the TSA, and this may or may not have caused them to miss their connecting flight.Not that anyone’s asking, but Pete was fucking _terrified_. What if the scan showed something _wrong_ inside of him? He’s never had an x-ray or an MRI. He doesn’t know if the right parts of him are meat instead of metal, doesn’t know if he’s real enough to fool a scan—doesn’t know if it’s even an issue of fooling, or if he’s true blue, one of the real ones. It was a bad time, waiting for someone to enter the pop-up interrogation room to do god knew what to him, watching dark figures move outside of fogged glass walls.

Everyone in the security line could see him, he felt: could see through him. A dark huddled mass of _notallthewayhuman_ in a plastic, non-weaponizable chair. Waiting there, he lost his faith in magic. In whatever forces animate him. In the ability of love to turn wire and foam and rubber into something more than the sum of its parts. He kept imagining black-suited agents storming in, slapping a file down on the table, accusing him of being a bomb or a medical experiment or a terrorist plot, demanding he explain whatever’s inside of him. He bets he looks like a Dali painting, under the skin. Twisted, melted, strange—something familiar all warped out of shape. By the time a harried-looking TSA agent finally did come in, he’d sweated through his shirt and was one sideways glance away from all-out bawling.

But none of his friends want to hear about that. He made them miss their connecting flight, that’s the topic on everybody’s minds—and now they’re stranded on a Sunday night in Texas, waiting on a redeye, with nothing to eat that doesn’t come from a vending machine. No one gives a shit about nuance.

Hours pass. Pete retreats deeper into himself, his sour-smelling fear, his commitment to his own isolation. He refuses the spoils from the Terminal 4 vending machine, which has trail mix and honeybuns, flaming Cheetos and candy bars. He has the notion that he doesn’t need food, or perhaps doesn’t deserve it. After all, they wouldn’t be in this position if he were born real, would they? Never mind that he’s had heartbeat and blood and skin to bruise for over a year, now. The TSA agent came in, patted him down, waved him all over with the wand, wiped his fingers for evidence of drugs. The whole time frowning. “Never seen a scan like that,” she said at last. “But you’re clean. I’ve got no reason to keep you.” He _is_ the reason they missed their flight. He’ll eat when they land in a new place and start over again, or else he won’t eat at all. What’s the difference?

When everyone else gets off the train, he stays. He rides it around empty for a while. He lets the rocking motion soothe him, imagines he’s home in Chicago on the Red line. The automated voice that announces terminal after terminal is far too twinkling and kind. The train is too clean. There aren’t enough weirdos on it. But it’s got its comforts nonetheless.

Eventually, he returns to the gate, rejoining his friends. He keeps to the fringes, hot with shame. He curls in an uncomfortable ball on a bench seat, tries to sleep with an armrest in his ribs and that same vague sense of deserving misery. He’s so hungry it’s turned into nothing. He’s got headphones in, but all he’s listening to is the ocean of his blood in his ears. It’s either soothing or surreal. He’s so far away that he cries out in surprise when he’s struck by a Snickers bar from above.

Patrick appears above him, scowling down under the brim of a trucker hat. “You’re sulking,” Patrick informs him, which is unnecessary, because Pete knows this.

“Everyone’s mad at me,” he says.

Patrick shoves his legs aside unceremoniously and plops down next to him. He shoulders in close, snuggling with such casual comfort that light starts to leak through the blinds Pete’s drawn around his heart. “We’re mad at Texas. And reality. And your belts. But it wouldn’t have been a problem if our first flight hadn’t been delayed, right?”

Pete watches Patrick out of the corner of his eye. “It’s my fault that—”

Patrick picks up the Snickers bar, tears the wrapper open, and shoves it towards Pete’s mouth. “Oh my god, stop being a martyr and eat something. Personally I feel one thousand times less crabby now that I’ve had a nutritious dinner of SunChips and Swedish Fish. I’m sorry I was a dick to you before.”

Pete tries again. “I caused—”

“ _Pete_ ,” Patrick interrupts. He’s laughing, a little. Pete does not see the humor of the situation. “Shut up, okay?”

“But I upset you,” says Pete.

“You are frequently upsetting,” Patrick tells him. “It doesn’t make me love you any less.”

This is the kind of thing Pete should have already known, maybe. But he hasn’t existed for very long, and he’s never been loved before. He’s new to all of this.

“Oh,” he says. He takes the Snickers bar. His needy, organic body clamors for it. His mouth floods with a truly embarrassing volume of drool. He keeps forgetting how hard it is for his limbic system to function right when his body is at a metabolic disadvantage. There are so many inconvenient intricacies to keep track of when you’re real.

“Even when you’re ridiculous, I’m gonna take care of you. You’re my Pete. Make me miss all the flights you want, I’m not ever going to stop loving you.”

“I’m not ever gonna stop loving you, either,” Pete says around a mouthful of Snickers. They curl up together uncomfortably on the airport bench, their bodies fitting so perfectly it’s easy to believe Pete was made for this exact moment, this exact man.

_I’m not ever gonna stop loving you either_ , he says. He means it.

*

Pete needs to figure out how to live without Patrick, how to be living without Patrick. Because apparently he’s going to.

*

Against all odds, he’s actually doing kind of better by the time he gets the message. After he meets the version of himself that dressed up as an animal and took himself out of the world, Pete starts making changes. He showers more, for example. He flushes the pills he probably can’t be trusted with down the toilet, then has a panic attack about what he’s just done to the water supply and has nothing pharmaceutical to soothe it with. He practices breathing, focusing on air-in-lungs, heart-in-chest. On the ways he can feel that he’s real. Every day he takes the dogs for a walk, and they seem to like him more for it. He considers the possibility they lost trust for him when he stopped performing basic care and hygiene rituals for any of them, rather than for any sinister reason. He begins to treat himself like he’s a living thing. He tells himself, _This is as real as you’re ever going to get._

So he kind of doesn’t need it anymore, when his phone lights up to announce a new, unread message from Patrick Stump. _I miss you too_ , the message could say. Just as easily, _fuck off and die_. But Pete is choosing to live in a world where love, real love, isn’t something you can undo. Where letting someone down doesn’t have to mean losing everything. Where Patrick loved him, will always in some way love him, and the goodness of that love will never leave him, even when the daily act of it does. Even if he was bad at it. Even if Patrick doesn’t want to be around him right now. Even if he’s every kind of messed up.

Because that’s what it is to be real.

Because of course this hurts.

Because if we are love, we are suffering also. If we exist, if we are real, if we are in contact with life, we contain both simultaneously.

He doesn’t open the message from Patrick. Not now, anyway. The unread message icon is a tiny red reminder of hope, of continuity, of the ability of any living thing (or relationship) to change and grow and be shaped by its experience. To live through its own past, and to keep going.

And even without opening the message? Pete checks—and checks, and checks—but try as he might, he can’t find a single part of him that’s plastic.  


End file.
